Only 29 hours and 20 minutes after we left. :)

24 miles to South Bend.

In Indy.

Still awake and alert after 24+ hours. God bless caffeine. :) Just stopped in Effingham, Illinois. (We decided to head back via Indianapolis instead of Chicago.) P.S. The previous post was by Becky,
not me. I cast no poxes (poxi?) upon lovely St. Louis. :)

Stuck in traffic in St. Louis. Gee. What a bloody shock. A foul pox on this evil hamlet.

In Rolla, Missouri.

Brendan and Becky’s ridiculous driving-through-the-night-because-Becky-feels-like-it adventure continues. :) We’re holding up fine, and just crossed into Missouri. We’re now in Joplin, which of course brings back memories of the rather eventful day in January 2004 when we almost stayed in Joplin.

Back across the border in Oklahoma (which it seemed like we were in forever), here are a couple of pictures from our most recent stop, at a Love’s gas station in Miami, OK:

In other news, in our perusal of local country radio stations across the Heartland, we have now heard “If You’re Going Through Hell” by Rodney Atkins fully four times (and counting). Which is okay, because it’s a damn good song. Far more annoying, IMHO, is the overplaying of George Strait’s “Give It Away.”

P.S. The “no duh” picture of the day comes from Amarillo, Texas:

Heh.

source file
MP3 File

At a gas station/convenience store/Subway restaurant in Elk City, OK. From the merchandise, this appears to be more Cowboy country than Sooner country.

Did I really just say “Boomer Sooner”? Please, someone, kill me now. :) Anyway, we're in Oklahoma.

Bill at INDJJournal links to my quitting-the-Democratic-Pary post, quotes it (”I am no longer a Democrat”), and then writes:

Do you feel it, Brendan? Do you feel the power of the dark side? Let the hate course through your veins!

Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-h-*cough*cough*cough* … *cough*

LOL!

Ace also links to my post, and throws out not Star Wars references but — even better — Lord of the Rings references, as he describes his own conversion to the “dark side,” years earlier:

I didn’t have as big as a defining event as Loy did. After thinking of myself as a Democrat (and liberal) all through high school, and actually subscribing to The Nation freshman year of college to “get informed” with “the real facts” (don’t worry– I stiffed them on the bill), and after being a big booster of “flaming centrist” Al Gore in 1988, I began drifting pretty fast.

Mostly by watching liberals and conservatives argue.

One side seemed to make sense, even if I knew in my heart they were racist and backwards and just plain ol’ wrong.

The other side seemed to screech and make things up on the fly and mostly spew out a lot of senseless twaddle. They seemed to have little comprehension of how these strange creatures called “human beings” actually thought, worked, and lived. They always seemed to be talking about some other, more angelic form of life, like High Elves or something. (Alternately, they were always talking about some far more demonic form of life, like, I don’t know, Balrogs, or Fiendish Dire Gelatinous Cubes.)

Heh. Read the whole thing.

I’ll have more to say about this, incidentally, if I ever get around to it — including an excellent response e-mail that I received from a Democratic reader (the one and only Dem whose response to my post was not calling me names and saying “good riddance,” but instead, trying to dissuade me — imagine that!)

We’re through Amarillo, and past most of the rough weather (though more may be ahead as we near the Oklahoma border).

Oklahoma City, our overnight stopping point back in May, is about 240 miles away. Becky, however, is making noises about driving through the night — something which she also proposed back in May, but which I vehemently rejected then because I was so freakin’ exhausted, post-exams, that I couldn’t possibly have done a shift driving, and Becky driving all night long while I sleep is obviously not terribly safe. Anyway, now she’s proposing the same thing (who knew Becky was so anxious to get back to South Bend?), and when I object, she asks, “Where’s your sense of adventure?” I’m not sure if I have the energy to fight this particular fight… so we may be driving through the night. :) Obviously, we’ll stop if we get too tired to continue — I’ll insist on that, at least.

I just managed to grab a screenshot of a Texas DOT traffic cam just as Becky and I were driving through the camera’s field of view! We’re the silver car behind the black-and-white truck.

Sweet!

Stuck in traffic in a thunderstorm in Amarillo.